How to create initial installer and upgrade installer?

[Raymond Wee]

Hi,

I'm currently developing an application for a POS Terminal using VB.net. Our project is approaching the last stage of development and I've been tasked to create 2 installers. 1 for Initial Installation, and the other for upgrade installation.

The project is composed of several elements. These are:
1. The application executable
2. Common DLLs that we developed
3. some resources (.resx and XML)

The requirement for the upgrade installer is that only those files with modification should be installed. (i.e. if only the xml or resx files are modified those are the only items that will be reinstalled, since the size of the upgrade installer is a consideration so we cannot reinstall everything).

I'm using Visual Studio 2005 for my deployment project but I'm a bit confused about how to set the properties of each file in such a way that during the upgrade, only the files that were modified would be updated and the rest of the files will not be removed since I'm setting RemovePreviousVersion property to True. I have a hunch that I need to do something with the custom action but I haven't been able to figure it out.

The upgrade installer setup is almost the same as the initial installer except that all files are excluded.

Could someone help me please?

I tried to acquire a copy of Phil Wilson's book (The definitive guide to Windows Installer) but its not available in our local bookstore and it would take too long to order it.

Basically while tinkering with the settings/properties there are instances where the dll was not updated and there are also times when the application exe was removed.

I already verified that the Product code is the same for both installers and that I'm sure that the version number is being incremented for each upgrade.

If I will be redoing both installers from scratch, how should I go about it?

I'm also confused about the Condition property and the transitive property.

[Paul Johnson]

InstallShield looks to be a solution here as it offers both install and update facilities (or did last time I looked)

[Raymond Wee]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately we are not allowed to use third party applications to build our installer. However, I was able to come up with a workaround.

The first time installer, I set permanent to true for all files.

For the upgrade installer, I modified the directory of the files to be updated. Instead of putting it in the application directory, I put it in a temporary folder.

Then in the commit custom action, I added a upgrade vbs file that would perform xcopy from the temporary directory to the target directory.

Its a bit crude but at least it works. My only problem now is the command I used to remove the temporary directory is causing a script error. The command I used is listed below:

Dim osShell
Set osShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
osShell.Run "del /F /S /Q C:\tmp"

[Paul Johnson]

Shouldn't osShell be set as a type? MSDN thinks it should (assuming the type is Shell), mostly for checking the return value.

If you're moving a file, why not just use System.IO.File.Move - you're assuming the target machine has xcopy on it!

[Raymond Wee]

Hi Paul,

I'm sorry, I'm just a beginner in vbs and the only reason I chose to use vbs was that its one of the allowable types when adding a program in custom action. I would have preferred using .bat. Regarding the code posted above, actually I just copied it from some existing script and modified it. The problem isn't actually osShell since before the delete statement I used osShell.Run to execute the xcopy function. I had some readonly files in the directory I'm supposed to delete so I'm wondering if the error is because of that, although based on the help of "del", "/F" should be able to handle that. besides its working when run under the command prompt.

Regarding xcopy,
I thought its a standard windows command. You mean it isn't part of the system commands in windows? The terminal I'm installing the application to uses WEPOS so I assume that it has the basic windows commands including xcopy.

[Paul Johnson]

it's a DOS command, so there isn't a guarantee of it being there. /F should have forced the delete, but again - things change...

[Raymond Wee]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for all the advice. I decided to move the statements out of the vbs file and into the batch file that called the installer. At least that way, I can control the result of xcopy in case there are errors, and also I found out that I should use rmdir instead of del since rmdir already covers deleting files and folder while for del, only the files are deleted.